Original articleBlindness and Visual Impairment in an Urban West African Population: The Tema Eye Survey
Section snippets
Study Population
Tema is a city of the Greater Accra region in Ghana, West Africa. Approximately 17.6% of Ghana's population lives in the Greater Accra region,11, 12 despite the fact that this is the geographically smallest of Ghana's 10 regions. The 2005 estimated population in the Tema District was 562 291, extrapolated from census data from 200012 and known birth and death rates. As one of the busiest ports in West Africa, Tema has attracted workers from all over Ghana, making it an ethnically and
Results
There were a total of 230 clusters identified for sampling in the 5 communities. Thirty-seven of these were randomly chosen, the number of clusters from each community (and therefore, the number of subjects) proportionate to the estimated number of people aged 40 years or older residing in each community. The house-to-house census enumerated 6806 eligible subjects, of whom 5603 came for the field examination for a participation rate of 82.3%. The field examination identified 1869 subjects
Discussion
The TES is one of only a few population studies of blindness, visual impairment, and eye diseases in West Africa and perhaps the only one that has studied a purely urban population. We found a high prevalence of curable vision loss due to uncorrected refractive error or cataract. The percentage of curable visual impairment from refractive error or cataract was 39.2%, and the percentage of curable blindness from these causes was 58.3%. In addition, preventable vision loss from glaucoma was found
Acknowledgments
The authors thank Pak Sang Lee of the National Institute for Health Research Biomedical Research Centre for Ophthalmology, UCL Institute of Ophthalmology, and Moorfields Eye Hospital, London, England, who provided technical training and support for this study.
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Manuscript no. 2011-40.
Financial Disclosure(s): The author(s) have no proprietary or commercial interest in any materials discussed in this article.
Supported by grants to International Aid (Spring Lake, MI) from Pfizer, Inc., the Allergan Foundation, Mid-Career Physician Scientist Award from the American Glaucoma Society (Dr. Budenz), National Institutes of Health, National Eye Institute Training Grant T32EY-07127, Clinical Trials Training Program in Vision Research (Dr. Whiteside-de Vos).
*Group members of the TES Study Group are listed online (available at http://aaojournal.org).
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A list of members of the TES Study Group is available at http://aaojournal.org.
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Dr. Whiteside-de Vos was not affiliated with the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health while conducting study activities in Ghana.